Pointers are well-known in software programming. A pointer refers to a programming language data type whose value refers or points to another value elsewhere in computer memory using its location or address. These pointers are assigned at the source code level and are particularly useful for repetitive operations since it is much more efficient, in terms of time and space, to copy and dereference a pointer than it is to copy and access the value that is referenced by the pointer. However, these pointers get “optimized away” during source code optimization “code optimization”), leaving the debugger unable to find referenced values in compiler-generated debug output and forcing the user (e.g., software developer, programmer) to perform the inefficient and cumbersome task of manually finding the referenced values, rely on un-optimized code, or even worse, give up.